Friday, February 9, 2007

More Bush Administration News We Already Knew: The Intelligence Books Were Cooked

Today's Washington Post is reporting more of what a lot of Americans suspected several years ago: Bush Administration officials justified the invasion of Iraq with faulty, highly exaggerated intelligence.

The new evidence comes from the Pentagon's inspector general, who concluded that Undersecretary of Defense Douglas Feith used reporting of dubious quality or reliability to support the Iraq invasion. Feith, along with Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and his deputy Paul Wolfowitz, were major administration supporters of the Iraq war policy.

Far from being objective investigators of fact, Feith knew what he kind of intelligence he wanted to find, so—no surprise here!— he and his staff found it. We'd call this kind of intelligence assessment blatantly dishonest.

Michigan Sen. Carl Levin, the new head of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, says the Pentagon report on Feith shows that the Iraq-al Qaeda link "was manipulated by high-ranking officials in the Department of Defense" in support of the war.

Another day, another piece of evidence that Bush, Cheney, and the neocons deceived the American people for reasons of their own and bullied their way through the facts to start a war they had no business starting and were ill-prepared to sustain.